4 ms·

Can someone explain 'bare metal' to me? Is it a better hypervisor or something? Why would it be better than all development effort put into something like lin

by snarfy 12y ago

Can someone explain 'bare metal' to me? Is it a better hypervisor or something? Why would it be better than all development effort put into something like linux? Doesn't the linux kernel run on 'bare metal'? A fellow developer tried to get me into openstack a little over three years ago, and when I looked, it was far too enterprise for my tastes, but I care more about code than the devops and managing servers.

chris_wot 12y ago
I'm pretty certain that's the point - you get a dedicated server. They seem to guaranteeing one to be setup for you in four minutes! Someone tell me if I'm wrong :-) This would mean he could give two hoots about virtualisation, I guess his concern would be automated deployment and network allocation, along with monitoring.
- andyidsinga 12y ago
  I tend to define it more like andrewstuart2 above > "not virtualized" ...as far as I know it doesn't really mean dedicated though. (although maybe it should ?) edit : why not dedicated ? ...because you can have containers running on "bare metal"
  - mburns 12y ago
    Containers are a form of virtualization, as are zones or jails. Bare metal implies dedicated hardware.
detaro 12y ago
If you want to give your users instances that have full hardware access, bare metal instances allow you to still manage that using OpenStack. This might be to allow access to GPUs or other specialized hardware. Another example is deploying hypervisors: Test suites for OpenStack are run against many different versions by using OpenStack to deploy the systems to test. HP's OpenStack distribution uses it as a deployment mechanism, taking over and managing the nodes of the OpenStack cluster from a small initial cluster.
bkeroack 12y ago
It means owning and controlling your own hardware. It's really, really nice to be able to reason about real hardware when doing performance optimization or deep bug analysis. If you're stuck in the public cloud ghetto there's only so deep you can go before throwing up your hands and saying, "eh, I guess Amazon is having a bad day..."
andrewstuart2 12y ago
Bare metal just means not virtualized. There's no hypervisor between the OS and the hardware (the hardware is made of metal, therefore "bare metal"). If you buy a computer with Windows on it, Windows is running on bare metal. Hypervisors run on bare metal. So yeah, as you suggested, if you install Linux on your computer, the Linux Kernel is running on the bare metal.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  So really, this is still virtualisation - but with less overhead.

by snarfy 12y ago

chris_wot 12y ago

I'm pretty certain that's the point - you get a dedicated server. They seem to guaranteeing one to be setup for you in four minutes! Someone tell me if I'm wrong :-) This would mean he could give two hoots about virtualisation, I guess his concern would be automated deployment and network allocation, along with monitoring.

andyidsinga 12y ago
I tend to define it more like andrewstuart2 above > "not virtualized" ...as far as I know it doesn't really mean dedicated though. (although maybe it should ?) edit : why not dedicated ? ...because you can have containers running on "bare metal"
- mburns 12y ago
  Containers are a form of virtualization, as are zones or jails. Bare metal implies dedicated hardware.

detaro 12y ago

If you want to give your users instances that have full hardware access, bare metal instances allow you to still manage that using OpenStack. This might be to allow access to GPUs or other specialized hardware. Another example is deploying hypervisors: Test suites for OpenStack are run against many different versions by using OpenStack to deploy the systems to test. HP's OpenStack distribution uses it as a deployment mechanism, taking over and managing the nodes of the OpenStack cluster from a small initial cluster.

bkeroack 12y ago

It means owning and controlling your own hardware. It's really, really nice to be able to reason about real hardware when doing performance optimization or deep bug analysis. If you're stuck in the public cloud ghetto there's only so deep you can go before throwing up your hands and saying, "eh, I guess Amazon is having a bad day..."

andrewstuart2 12y ago

Bare metal just means not virtualized. There's no hypervisor between the OS and the hardware (the hardware is made of metal, therefore "bare metal"). If you buy a computer with Windows on it, Windows is running on bare metal. Hypervisors run on bare metal. So yeah, as you suggested, if you install Linux on your computer, the Linux Kernel is running on the bare metal.

chris_wot 12y ago
So really, this is still virtualisation - but with less overhead.